


Salvation

by nirejseki



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, but especially in the past, implications of graphic violence, it sucks to be black in America, period appropriate racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-16
Updated: 2016-04-16
Packaged: 2018-06-02 14:36:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6570100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's really no excuse for forgetting where and when you are in the timeline.</p><p>AU of 1.11 - request was for a retelling of the Magnificent Eight with Len being captured.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salvation

“We got to go,” Hex reiterated.

“Not without Jax,” Len snarled back. He could feel Mick at his back, silently supporting him; that was how this was supposed to work, the two of them in absolute agreement. Shoulder to shoulder against condescending bastards. 

“We got Stillwater, that means we got leverage. Live to fight another day or die tonight, your choice.” 

Ray grimaced and turned away, but Len hung back a little. Mick glanced at him as he passed and Len raised his eyebrows at him. Mick blinked, then grinned viciously, heading after the others with twice as much noise in the saddle as he’d been making previously.

Len wondered absently if Mick had always known how to ride horses or if it had (somehow) been something he had learned under the Time Masters, but put that thought aside. He’d been torturing himself with thoughts like that for days; now really wasn’t the time. He waited until the others were gone before leading his horse into a quiet copse of trees, tying the reins to a secure-looking tree branch and leaving it with a nose full of oats to keep it quiet. Len had no idea if something was going to try to eat his horse while he was gone – Mick was the one who’d been born organic-style on a farm, _Len_ was born like a normal person: in a cheap car stuck in traffic on the way to the hospital – but he also didn’t much care. He wasn’t leaving Jax behind.

Luckily, the skillset needed to silently break in to creaky old mansion houses and to sneak around quietly in the dark of a forest weren’t so different. Len skirted the edge of the firelight, heading to where he heard the biggest commotion and hoping he wasn’t too late. He was honestly surprised at Hex for not realizing the magnitude of the danger to Jax here; Ray, sure, Ray was the worst type of liberal, who was so comfortable anywhere he went in his lily pale skin that he totally forgot that historically, other people weren’t nearly so comfortable. Hex didn’t even have the excuse of not being from the time period. 

“- no goddamn _coon_ can shoot that well!” one of the outlaws was protesting vehemently. Jax was tied up at his feet, looking appropriately terrified but trying to hide it. _He_ definitely hadn’t forgotten his history – sure, the Miranda rights had been passed in 1966, but there’d never been a federal law passed banning lynching, even if that sort of thing was important to these assholes. 

Len wished he had enough bullets in his gun to prove the asshole wrong, but there was bravery, and then there was suicide, and he wasn’t going to risk anything happening to Jax because he couldn’t keep his cool in the face of the slate of racial epithets he was overhearing. A bit more old-timey, sure, but nothing that different from what he’d heard in prison growing up; some things really never changed. 

The Stillwater gang clearly wasn’t too pleased at losing their leader to Ray’s enthusiasm – more than one pointed phrase was aimed at him, most of them using a term that Len was pretty sure had totally disappeared out of usage because he had no clue what it was supposed to mean – and while he hadn’t been paying all that much attention during the initial briefing, totally missed what state Salvation was supposed to be in, the outlaws’ wide range of thick accents spoke for themselves. 

Fuck, it was less than _six years_ after the end of the Civil War. 

Another one spat at his feet, narrowly missing Jax. “I say we string ‘em up now and go get Jeb back.”

“Naw, it’s too risky. We got their boy, they’ll trade Jeb back to us for ‘em. Bet you they don’t wait more than an hour before sending someone to set up a quick draw at noon.”

“What’ll we do with the darkie ‘till then?”

“I say we give him back a few pieces short,” one of them guffawed, making a crude gesture at his crotch. Len glanced at Jax, whose blood had all fled his face, wishing he could make clear that he wasn’t alone but not willing to risk revealing himself. “I doubt any of ‘em’d notice.”

“He might bleed out,” another said, jabbing at Jax’s side with his boot. “Look at him, he’s all fat and soft. Disgusting. Don’t see why we can’t tie him to a post and give him a few lashes to keep him warm ‘till morning, though.”

General assorted laughter. Someone pulled out a bull whip and another a crop; they started comparing the two back and forth to hoots and jeers even as two outlaws yanked a quietly whimpering Jax to his feet and started dragging him over to a spare hitching post. 

_Hell_ no.

Len checked the number of bullets in his gun. Definitely not enough to take them all down and he couldn’t count on grabbing anyone else’s gun for a reload, he wasn’t the Flash – if their guns even worked reliably, they were grimy and ill-maintained in comparison to the brand new versions Rip had fabricated up for them, and even those didn’t go off half the time he fired them. 

Mick’s approach to fighting it is.

Len pulled out the bottle of whiskey (or something crudely masquerading under that name, anyway) that he’d lifted from the saloon, yanking out his tie and forming a very crude Molotov. Tastes like gasoline indeed. Mick’s old lighter did the rest and he pitched it straight at the tents. 

As the outlaws were distracted by the sudden appearance of a giant fireball, Len ran straight to Jax, shooting the two stunned outlaws holding onto him as he moved. 

“You have _no idea_ how happy I am to see you right now,” Jax said. 

“I got good ears, kid; I’ve got some idea,” Len drawled, cutting through the ropes holding Jax still as quickly as he could, hoping to get him away before any of the Stillwaters noticed them in the flurry of activity trying to put out the fire. Unfortunately, the fire had also made the entire clearing noticeably brighter.

“Yeah, your new hand is spiffy and all, but I did _not_ want to have to test Gideon’s regen tech on something a bit more private, if you know what I mean.”

“I left my horse in a set of trees – go long about forty yards north east, ten across. Soon as you’re free, get the hell out of here; I’ll cover you.”

Jax didn’t need more than that, heading off at his highly impressive top speed – Len quietly blessed American football; he would have needed to spend an extra few minutes on directions for anyone else. 

Len turned back to the now-aware-of-him gang of outlaws, grimly firing until even his spare gun had run out of bullets. He should have told Rip to fuck off and brought his cold gun. 

He pulled out a knife and put it into the shoulder of an approaching outlaw who thought it was now safe, only to hear a familiar click as a pistol was pointed at his head from behind. Looks like there was a least one person in the Stillwater gang whose ability to move in the dark was nearly as good as his. He was getting real tired of being in this position.

“Put it down,” the man behind him said. His breath stank of liquor. 

Len obediently dropped the second knife he’d pulled out. 

“Search him,” the man ordered. “This one’s a tricky one.”

The ensuing pat-down was exceedingly unfriendly. “Now this is just like home,” Len drawled. “You do that near as well as the folks back at the Hub City jail.” _But not nearly as well as the folks at Iron Heights_ , he thought, twisting his ankle to hide the shiv he’d slipped into his boot. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing, and if they tied him up with ropes and left him alone for four minutes, he’d be able to get away.

An outlaw’s fist met his stomach, hard, and he revised that estimate up to six minutes to account for bruise-related delays. Maybe eight if they broke a rib. Fifteen and up if they broke an arm or, worse, a leg.

“Hub City jail, huh?” one of them asked. “What’d you do to get a visit there?”

“Which time?” Len smirked, getting another punch, this time to the face. Nothing compared to what Mick had done, though it hurt more for being on still-tender skin. 

“Stop being smart and answer the question.”

“One of my partners screwed me over and left me holding the bag when the badges ran in,” Len answered. Honestly, even. “People get so uptight when you visit a bank past closing hours, you know?”

One of the outlaws guffawed a little, but most of them looked unimpressed. Lucky Len wasn’t counting on bonding with them over their shared profession. As much as one could count criminality as a profession, anyway; even in the future, a high end city thief like him didn’t have much in common with the sort of people that terrorized the countryside. No, he’d killed too many of their men to hope for any sort of sympathy. 

“Someone hog-tie this little bastard,” the leader – the one who had snuck up on him – decided. “We need to have someone to trade for Jeb tomorrow, and this fucker let the darkie escape.”

“You a coon-lover?” one of them snarled at him. “Your momma have a taste for dark meat?”

 _My dad was the white one, actually_ , Len thought to himself, hoping that the shade of his skin in contrast with Jax’s would keep anyone from thinking on it too closely. He didn’t want to test out Gideon’s regen tech on anything private either. _I bet your brains would explode if you found out she was Jewish, too._

In the interest of not dying, though, he kept his mouth shut.

They trussed him up pretty good and (more annoyingly) stationed a few guys to watch him. Someone identified him as the one who’d started it all by shooting the guy who’d been threatening Stein in the saloon and he got a few steel-tipped boots to the ribs, causing at least one audible crack. Len hated broken ribs. Hopefully Gideon could fix those. Before anything escalated further, though, and it was quickly threatening to, someone rode into the camp, calling out that a quick draw had been set up for high noon, winners take their prisoner back.

Len entertained himself for a while wondering how they were deciding who was going to engage in the duel. Ray would volunteer, of course, he’d totally bought into the scenario. Mick…best not wonder about that. Hex wouldn’t care enough. If Sara was back in time, she might do pretty well. No, Rip would probably do his by now traditional last minute pivot, try to rush in at the climax to be the rescuing hero. A shoot-out at high noon – that would appeal to their erstwhile captain’s sense of drama. As someone with a fine-tuned sense of drama himself, Len knew how to recognize it in others. 

He wondered absently if Jax would give an appropriately outsized Wild West re-telling of Len’s rescue of him, and of the dangers he’d been in. He wondered with slightly more bitterness if any of the crew would remember that – his pallor aside – the outlaws could still decide to do the same to him as they’d promised to Jax. 

He wiggled a bit, testing the give of the ropes, wondering if he could get to the shiv in his boot even with the guards. They weren’t even low grade prison quality; they were swapping a bottle of foul-smelling alcohol between them, but one of them was the one who’d offered up the bull whip, and he still had it on his belt, and the more he drank the more his fingers played with it.

Yeah, this was going to hurt.

They let him ride a horse back to Salvation, though Len wasn’t exactly inclined to thank them for it when every step the horse took shook his entire body with agony as ribs and the stripes on his back both screamed in protest. He managed to get his hands up to his face to wipe off the remaining tears and snot; he didn’t want to distract his team from the _very important_ task of murdering these bastards. Even if the rest of the team was inclined to let them go once the trade was done, Len certainly wasn’t. 

Sure, he still had all his important parts, but he wasn’t feeling very grateful right now. Once Jax had gotten back to the ship, they had access to Firestorm again; they could have launched a full-out attack to rescue him. But no, _Rip_ had probably insisted that they had to prevent any impact on the timeline. Like a bunch of drunk outlaws would ever be believed for what they claimed they saw in a dark forest in the middle of the night; at most, it’d probably give the area a new ghost story. Much more deniable than any action they might have to take in the middle of the town, should everything go wrong. But no, they weren’t going with that. Rip wanted his moment of drama in the spotlight.

Len was feeling a little bit bitter, but he had two broken ribs, half a dozen lines of fire on his back and a throat still raw from screaming; bitter felt like the right place to be. 

Sure enough, once they got there, Rip was volunteering to stand up for “Sheriff Palmer” – apparently no one had filled him in on the whole “John Wayne” routine Ray had been up to. Jeb Stillwater made a few nasty remarks, but the whole affair was unsurprisingly over within minutes.

Len waited as the fucker next to him – same bastard that had the bull whip – started to untie his hands. The second his hands were free he went for his boot, slid the long piece of metal right between the man’s ribs. “That’s for the hospitality,” he snarled, sliding off the horse and landing with a nauseating thump on the ground and walking stiffly back to his side before the man entirely seemed to realize that he’d been stabbed. 

The other members of the gang rode off quickly with Stillwater’s body, ignoring that man as he swayed and eventually fell off his horse and falling face down in the mud. Len hoped he drowned in it before the blood loss from the stab wound finished him off. Some enterprising town-person quickly took care of the horse; Len wished them the best of it.

“Guys?” Sara said. “I don’t think we’re done here.” Len turned back. Thick, unpleasant looking armor, clearly not from this period? Gigantic guns that looked like the thing Mick had been carting around as Kronos? Looks like the Hunters had found them after all.

He really hoped Mick had been exaggerating their prowess.

Len grabbed a few pistols and a rifle from some of the nearby townsfolk, aiming to make it look like his decision to take the sniper role was a matter of strategy, not necessity. “Hey, where’s our guns?” he called to Rip, who seemed to have brought a set of his own pistols, but not his and Mick’s much, much more useful gear.

“Sorry, I took what I could carry,” Rip replied. Len rolled his eyes and lifted the rifle. He wasn’t sure if he could get past the armor, but he could distract them as the others hit them point blank. He aimed for the eyes. 

Luckily, the fight was over much faster than he would have thought – Ray took out one, Mick stabbed another, Len didn’t even see what happened to the last one but he would bet money Firestorm was involved. Time to limp back to the Waverider and see if he could interest Gideon in the concept of doctor-patient confidentiality. 

“You’re welcome,” Rip called after him. Len ignored him.

Just inside the door, though, a heavy hand fell on his shoulder and he flinched automatically. Mick pulled away, but not too far. “You should come to the bridge,” he advised. “There’s important information you should hear.”

Len nodded stiffly and turned in the appropriate direction. Medical attention could wait, it seemed. He carefully laid himself out against one of the consoles in a pose that could almost pass as relaxed. This had better be some very useful information. 

Instead, they got some confusing discussion of something called the Omega Protocols and someone called “the Pilgrim” – did the Time Masters actually develop a new ‘most terrifying assassin’ every time, or was Rip just really bad at remembering who was the most terrifying? Mick had said something about the Vanishing Point not working like normal time, so maybe new ‘most terrifying’ assassins were invented and retroactively woven into the timeline as they were going.

Nah, that was giving Rip too much credit. 

Jax approached him afterwards. “Hey, man, I just wanted to thank you for getting me out of that situation,” he said.

“Don’t mention it,” Len drawled. “No, really. Don’t mention it. Ever.”

Jax laughed and punched him in the shoulder before moving on. Len was pretty sure the kid meant it as a light tap, but it jarred his back and everything swam sickeningly in his vision for a minute.

When his eyes did focus again, Mick was standing in front of him, frowning. 

“Can I help you?” Len asked icily, all those thoughts he’d been so carefully not-thinking – why didn’t you come get me from the gang? Did you even notice I was gone? Were you really going to let my life depend on Rip’s shooting? – came flooding back in. He didn’t want to have this conversation with Mick now; he _wanted_ to get to the medical lab with no one seeing and then hie himself off to bed where he could brood over his sins in peace.

Mick seemed almost uncertain, which was unusual – they’d worked out Mick’s desire to kill him in their fist fight, he was back with the team now, but they hadn’t worked out any of the rest, and Mick had been handling it by avoiding him like he’d developed the plague. It was strange enough that he was coming to talk to Len now, even more so that he did it without spitting out what he wanted and moving along. 

Mick’s fists clenched. Len’s eyes flicked down to them. Man, he really hoped Mick didn’t want to go for round 2 right now. He hadn’t had any hope of winning the first round, but he’d at least put up enough of a show to salvage his pride; this time he wasn’t entirely sure he could hold up his fists long enough for the pretense of resistance. 

“You’re bleeding on the console,” Mick said unexpectedly. Len automatically checked – sure enough, some blood had spilled down his arm and a few drops had dripped onto the table. Only a few, so Len mopped it up quickly with his sleeve. 

“Must’ve cut myself,” he says, checking quickly behind him to make sure his back – which had barely closed up before the horse ride and subsequent fight, which had definitely re-opened everything – hadn’t left a larger stain, but his shirt, vest, and jacket were effectively soaking up the majority of the blood, and black was a color that hid many sins. Not for much longer, though, if he kept standing around like an idiot. He could feel liquid sliding down, dripping down to his legs. “I’ll go get that checked out, then. Tetanus, you know how it is.”

Mick’s fists were still clenched, his knuckles white, and his jaw was locked. He was upset about something. Seriously, was the console important or something? Mick knew how to drive time ships now, maybe Len’d nearly shorted out the navigation or something. Mick had always been the driver for the two of them and he’d shouted about Len putting his feet up on the dash nearly as often as Len’d shouted about seatbelts.

“If that’s all,” Len said, edging around his partner. “I’ll just be going.”

“Len…”

“What?”

Mick ground his teeth together. “Nothing.”

Len nodded, and turned away, deliberately putting his back to Mick. A minor show of trust, but that’s what they were reduced to, now. His fault. The way they used to be, Mick would have taken him to the hospital or whatever medical help they could get, shadowing him the whole way to make sure he felt secure in his weakness, a strong arm to lean against when his legs threatened to give out. Something else to think about.

A second later, Mick fell into step beside him.

“You forget to say something?” Len asked, trying to regulate his breathing so that it came out more naturally than panting in pain like he wanted.

“No,” Mick said. “But you did.”

And he offered his arm.

**Author's Note:**

> I take requests at robininthelabyrinth at tumblr or here.


End file.
